 Jeremy Gill |
 John Michael Graham |
 Alastair Hickey |
 Jessica Hodge |
 Georgianna Kimlin |
 Benjamin Norman |
The project selected for this year’s final project focusses on the Duck Creek Corridor, a remarkable yet little known urban landscape and landscape resource just south of Parramatta in Sydney’s west. Peripheral in a classic sense, it has a decidedly suburban character - mainly post war houses complemented by large warehouses and rail yards, a dominant creek bed degraded by industry and the familiar form of neglect that characterizes huge swathes of our urban geography. Curiously detached, its remoteness is at odds with its social infrastructure, its clear urban grid, its many stations and enclosing rail lines, its parks and other amenities of great value. It is “vast” ( ‘Intimate Immensity’, Poetics of Space, Bachelard) - this epic quality reinforced by its undulating topography, sparse vegetation and low scale fabric, allowing views out to distant spaces and mediation with an extensive Sydney Forest, all but now forgotten.
In this subject, students were asked to engage with the complexity of Sydney’s urban growth, an issue increasingly fraught by ongoing crises of water supply, a low provision of housing, transport and social infrastructure, and our continuing legacy of market driven land release. Departing from Manuel De Sola Morales’ Culture of Description, students were asked to critically appraise a large and complex urban area, producing detailed analyses of its physical, social and cultural qualities, as a basis for new urban strategies to house 50 – 100, 000 new residents. Each proposal drew from precedent, with strategies including new urban centers and island projects, autonomous models of densification - such as Peter Myers’ Section - new hybrid building and landscape types, integrated light rail systems and the remediation of the Duck Creek itself. As part of this process, student groups adapted Christopher Alexander’s Pattern Language to an intense film analysis - revealing those narrative components essential to new urban culture - explored local and international examples in a comparative analysis, and engaged in lively urban debate in a seminar environment.
With the recent project for 500, 000 new residents along the Canberra - Sydney Corridor (Landscape 1401, 2004), this project demonstrates an ongoing commitment by the UNSW landscape students to Sydney’s greater urban environment, offering an alternative means to growing our city. A series of new urban projects rejuvenating our valuable landscape resources, supported by new transport links and engaging smart compact building types, may yet replace the dictum of new suburban estates and forced amalgamation….there is hope yet!
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